What I Bought 12/17/2012 - Part 6

Hopefully you're all having a nice Christmas, if you celebrate it. If not, hopefully you're having a nice Tuesday. Unless, you're across the International Date Line, in which case hopefully you had a nice Tuesday (whether you celebrated Christmas or not), and are having a nice Wednesday.

I think that covers all the bases.

Hawkeye #4, 5, by Matt Fraction (writer), Javier Pulido (artist), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer) - I'm still not a huge fan on these covers, but I don't like the connection between these two. Before and after, or the clean lie and the messy truth. Can I also say, I don't care what Fraction says, Clint is not "Hawkguy"? He's Hawkeye, period. Except when he's Goliath, which hopefully isn't going to happen again any time soon.

SHIELD had a tape of a sensitive operation. This tape has been stolen. Clint is tasked with going to Madripoor and getting it back, presumably by purchasing it. Which raises the question of why you need him, specifically, if all you want is for someone to take your unlimited credit card and go spend, but whatever. Clint avoids being beaten up by security forces, gets his wallet pinched during a cab ride, which, you have a 4-man team to steal one wallet? That's horribly inefficient. You'd think Madripoor would have smarter crooks.

Clint finds the auction eventually, and promptly gets grabbed by Madame Masque's goons. Which is how we learn where Clint hid the credit card. Jeez, Clint, really? Masque performing a proctology exam on you wasn't something I expected to see. Not without getting on the Internet, anyway. Clint's left tied up in a room, where ninjas try to kill him, and Clint decides going out the window is a good idea. Well, no one ever said Clint was a tactical genius. Masque wins the auction (and when the hell did Fisk take control of the Hand? Is that some Shadowland fallout?), and we find out it's Kate impersonating Masque, who is tied up in her own hotel room. That's issue 4.

5 is Clint not dying, Kate's cover getting blown, Clint saving Kate, and the two of them beating up lots of people to escape with the tape. Which they manage, but not before Clint takes one in the chest from Madam Masque. At least Clint remembered to wear a vest. Then we find out the tape of Clint killing the world's biggest terrorist was faked, to keep the identities of the soldiers who really did it safe. And it was leaked by the new Nick Fury to help ferret out a leak in his new SHIELD, which he says will be much better than his dad's, and ugh, shut up, you irritating smug, fuckwitted progeny of some writers desire to synchronize with the movies.

That was an interesting story. Clint's even worse at espionage work than I thought he'd be, but I can buy it. Let's talk about the art. Javier Pulido filled in, and while he's not Aja, he's not bad. The panel layouts are less inventive (though I liked the gunshot sequence with Masque near the end of #5), and Pulido uses fewer panels per page, I think. I might need to check that. Aja might balance out some of those pages with over a dozen panels with more splash pages, while Pulido settles into a 5-6 panel per page average. Yeah, I need to check it. Looking at issue 5, there were 121 panels across 20 pages, but it varies from 2 up to 9 a couple of times, but yeah, there are a lot of 5 to 6 panel pages. It's 129 in #4, ranging from 1 (on the first page) to 9.

Pulido does a better job of sticking to Aja's version of Clint than he does with Kate. Hollingsworth has some decent color cues in #4 when she's in disguise to help, but when she removed the mask I had no idea who she was until I saw the real Masque in the background. Hollingsworth altered his coloring style a bit for Pulido. The colors are softer, more mixed and muted then they were for Aja. But Aja's stuff also had a lot of those purples against black outlines, and Pulido doesn't do that much. He opts for having the clothes colored, but Clint and Kate's faces blacked out. Maybe for the theoretical covert nature of the mission, their identities will be hidden, denied by the authorities? There were times Pulido's faces had an Archie (so would that make it Dan Decarlo?) quality to them. Expression through exaggeration, which is true overall, his style is more exaggerated than Aja's, but it works.

No trouble following what's going on, and I think Pulido does his own sound effects. Some of which are kind of silly. Arrow shaters a window to "KGLASSSSS". Door kicked open to "FOOTOOMP". Stuff like that. I appreciate the effort, but the silliness of them kind of distracts from the story. Whatever, it was a good story all around, except for stupid new Nick Fury.